keith ehrlich / director

filed under places

Skateistan: To Live And Skate Kabul is a gorgeous short film portrait that focuses on how skateboarding and a skate park provides a young generation of Afghani boys and girls alike with hope in a place riddled with tragedy.

Steve Duncan calls himself an urban explorer. He is interested in seeing and documenting cityscapes from a perspective that we are not allowed to and are mostly unaware of. Watch Duncan explore NYC’s train tunnels, sewer system and climb to top of the Williamsburg Bridge at night without any safety equipment.

Bluejake is a photoblog showing the work of photographer Jake Dobkin. He mostly shoots urban landscapes. The majority of the work on his site is shot in NYC. His archives is an incredible location resource.

Atlas Obscura refers to itself as a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. That’s exactly what it is. I’d add that it is also a maze of wonderment that will steal the hours from your day.

Sometimes New Yorkers take their subway system for granted. The system, much of which is over 100 years old moves more than 5 million people a day. Here is a wonderful photo retrospective of the NYC subway through the decades.

I finally made it to Dia:Beacon. The giant old factory turned into a large scale art space is home to work from the 1960’s to present. It was quiet exciting to see so much work from so many of my favorite modern artists including: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback and Dan Flavin. Though it was the mathematical wall drawings of Sol LeWitt that I wanted to stare at most. See time-lapse of one of his wall drawings here.

I sometimes forget that Coney Island is just a short subway ride away. I went for a visit yesterday. We had some fried clams and beer at Ruby’s and took in all of the craziness. Kids were diving off the pier. Impromptu boardwalk dance parties made for surreal cultural mashings of Latinos, African Americans, hipsters, and transvestites. The rhythms were provided by older Latin men. Then we made our way down to the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach and sampled the vareniki, pelmeni and pickled watermelon at Cafe Glechik.

There has been a good amount of buzz about Prime Meats which opened earlier this year in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The praise is quite worthy. The restaurant’s interior is designed with lots of wooden details and oil-style lamps that create an environment that harkens back to earlier times in America. Prim waiters uniformed in button-downs, brace suspenders, and raw denim add to the upscale meets old world working class vibe. This all really works. And truth told; one can dine at Prime Meats modesty or go for the pricier selections. The choice is yours. The house made drinks are refreshing and delicious. Good luck making them as good at home. Nothing that I ate was less than fantastic: celery salad, raw oysters, steak frites, a soft shell crab dish, and a mean chocolate cake. It’s also worth mentioning that Prime Meats locally sources their ingredients and also does all of their own butchering in-house.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre take photos of places that were once quite populated and are now long forgotten. The Ruins of Detroit is a testament to the decline of the city from having once been a dense place of culture. The same can be said of their series on Theaters.